Twilight
by NDV
Summary: Reflective piece, fast-forward a few years. Just a short one...


This piece was pretty much thrown together when I was in a mood... so be forewarned it's nowhere near one of my best, but I think it conveys my current emotions fairly decently. The name is from the Vanessa Carlton song of the same title. "I was stained, with a role/in a day not my own/but as you walked into my life/you showed what needed to be shown/I always knew, what was right/I just didn't know that I might/peel away and choose to see/with such a different light."  
  
Also, I've never attempted to do Sam before, so here we go on this one. It's short, so if I mess up, hopefully I won't mess up too badly.  
  
For M, because you are my twilight. And S, because I don't hate winter rain so much when I think of you.  
  
  
Twilight  
  
  
It was raining the day she left and I've never felt so cold.  
  
All hazy and surreal gray areas, like her, for no black and white was ever allowed in her world. Always a line to straddle, an opinion to give, a world to educate. No room for ignorant absolutes.   
  
They say she called out "pretty boy" and "princeton" in her sleep, and everyone knows she was calling me.  
  
But I did not hear because her words were soft, articulation smeared, and twilight, hazy and gray like her spirit, broke over the damp grass as she called my name.  
  
The rain never stops during Washington winters, rain and snow and cold wind... earth being ravaged, Rose Garden being plundered. It never stops in December, but she loved cold rain and gray afternoons, and sometimes every great once and a while, I'd laugh at her as she danced with arms spread wide and head thrown back, free spirit flying just below the clouds.   
  
She was beautiful then, luminate skin under gray skies. Always so beautiful.  
  
And I remember, then, curling with her before roaring fire in her too-narrow bed when she returned, soaked from her dancing, body swinging like a gypsy, eyes wild with desire. Hands gliding over flame-flicked flesh, thunder rolling above, below, and within. Winter storms of rain and sleet and lightning could not compare to those in the gray areas, her gray areas... so volatile yet oh-so-magnificently frightening. Like the greatest phenomena in the realm of nature.  
  
Her eyes were like that, tempest-tossed seas and torn rose petals lying at Aphrodite's feet, twilight and dusk blending into one with only the narrowest of light rays falling in between.   
  
That's how she was, what she did. Living day to day, living twilight to twilight. Darkness fell over cornfields in rural Virginia and dared not touch the glory of the tallest of steel skyscrapers, and she watched with feline eyes and an appreciative admiration when I took her hand and pulled her from the office door to wherever the next haunt must be, wherever the closest sheets and pillows might wait. She was beautiful when green turned to golden amber in reflections of burning embers, and she was beautiful when the lights were low and I could barely see the outline of her lips, yet could sense them with my own.  
  
All twilight and gray-areas, shades of amber eyes and dusty rose petal skin. So different than anything I expected, so free and wild and spirited, so hazy and seductive and gentle. So much more than anything I expected. Tenderness and strength and anger boiled into one solution, perfected to outlast time through memory, though shadowed and long stale.   
  
It was raining the day she left, and she always did have an affinity for water. She dove into pools fully clothed or wearing nothing, no matter the season, always breaking the surface, both figuratively and literally, with a dignified expression and often with a comehither grin. Inviting and tantalizing but never quite scandalous enough to warrant exceptional attention... other than mine, the rest of the boys. She loved rain, storms, cold afternoons spent walking the banks of the Potomac or in her own back yard. She loved untamed grass and groomed rose bushes. Overcast skies and melancholy movies.  
  
I wasn't there because it was raining, and she hated that I hated rainy days. So she walked away, following that twilight in a way I could only imagine, all artist and gypsy and dancer. She called me her pretty boy, her Princeton graduate, as she ran her hand down the side of my face. She called me her friend but never her lover, though it was impossible for us to be one and not the other. But it was all gray area with her, all shadowed and hazy and not-so-clear.   
  
And when she walked away, I did not see her, because the gray areas faded into memory and so did the feel of her hands and the shape of her eyes.   
  
But I remember the rain and the way twilight falls over the Potomac. And I remember the feel of thunder and the flicker of firelight, amber colored eyes and luminate skin. I remember dancing, and I remember laughing, and I remember gray.  
  
The day she left, raindrops splattered on asphalt, and the world had never been so cold.  
  
  
and I will always reach too high   
cause I've seen twilight 


End file.
